Recipe: Nick Selvadurai’s Meringue-Like Pink Harvest Ramos Fizz

“The Ramos Gin Fizz is a classic cocktail from New Orleans and has this whole air behind it because, as the story goes, it needs to be shaken for seven minutes,” says Nick Selvadurai, group bars manager for Sand Hill Road (The Espy, Garden State, Waterside Hotel).

The idea behind this arm-aching shake is to transform the ingredients until they’re luxuriously thick. “You’ve got egg white and cream, and essentially you’re trying to froth them up as though you’re making a meringue,” says Selvadurai. “Think pavlova-ish vibes. That’s sort of what’s going on.” With a modern understanding of the science behind the froth, Selvadurai’s version speeds things up by one or two minutes. Bakers often use cream of tartar to stiffen their meringue, but here the acid is supplied by lemon juice.

To get started, you’ll want to have infused your gin the night before for maximum flavour extraction. Selvadurai uses a citrusy gin as the base, then combines the infused gin with Schweppes Infused Raspberry Mineral Water. “The mineral water has very high notes of raspberry, so they’re subtle flavours – as if you were smelling some fresh raspberries,” says Selvadurai. “The raspberry gin gives you more of that jammy, middle-palate texture you’d want from raspberries themselves.”

Once you’ve combined the ingredients in a cocktail shaker, the next step is what the pros call “dry shaking”. “Dry shaking is basically shaking the shaker without ice in it – ice being made from water, water being wet,” says Selvadurai. This is the step that gives you those stiff, meringue-like peaks.

Then add cream to the cocktail while cooling it down with ice. When you start shaking, you’ll hear the ice rattling – shake it until the sound disappears.

“Just shake the bejeezus out of it,” says Selvadurai. “For me that took around about a minute. For most that’ll sit around two minutes, alternating hands.” Double-strain (that’s using a sieve or tea strainer as well as your standard strainer) into a glass and let it rest in the fridge. After a couple of minutes, the cocktail will have separated into a thick, foamy head on top and a pink, milky liquid on the bottom. All that’s left is to add the raspberry mineral water – just enough to lift the foam head above the rim of the glass – and garnish with a single mint leaf.

The result is visually nostalgic. “The mineral water lifts the foam up out of the glass and you get something between a float and a spider,” says Selvadurai. It’s matched by a combo of flavours Selvadurai likens to a “little flavour explosion in the mouth. When you start putting things like cream and egg white into a fizzy cocktail, it ticks all the boxes. It fills out your palate, but at the same time it doesn’t linger on there because of the carbonation. It’s not jammy and sticky, it moves through the palate but also fills it.”

Here’s how to make Nick Selvadurai’s Harvest Ramos Fizz at home.

Nick Selvadurai’s Harvest Ramos Fizz
Makes 1 serve. Approx 1.9 standard drinks.

Ingredients:
40ml raspberry-infused gin (see below)
30ml lemon juice
20ml bianco vermouth/aromatised wine (Selvadurai uses Cocchi Americano)
15ml sugar syrup (1:1 ratio)
15ml fresh egg white
2 mint leaves (and 1 more to garnish)
20ml pouring cream
120ml Schweppes Infused Raspberry Mineral Water, chilled

Raspberry gin
100g frozen raspberries
700ml gin

Method:
For the raspberry-infused gin, combine frozen raspberries and gin in a container. Allow to infuse overnight in the fridge then strain.

To make the cocktail, combine all ingredients except the cream and Schweppes Infused Raspberry Mineral Water in the shaker. Dry shake (without ice) to whip everything together (approx. 20 seconds).

Open shaker, add 3 ice cubes. Shake hard until you can no longer hear the ice rattling (approx. 2 mins).

Double-strain with a Hawthorne and a sieve strainer into glass. Set glass in fridge to settle (approx. 1–2 mins).

Rinse shaker and add the mineral water. Take glass from the fridge and slowly pour mineral water into the centre of the glass, allowing foam to extrude over the rim.

Garnish with mint leaf. Add straw and serve.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Schweppes. See more Schweppes recipes. 18+ only. Please drink responsibly.